James Cameron - Director

Nationality:
American.
Born:
James Francis Cameron in Kapuskasing, Ontario, Canada, 26 August, 1954;
moved to the United States in 1971.
Education:
Graduated in physics at California State University, Fullerton.
Family:
Married 1) Sharon Williams, 1974 (divorced 1985); 2) Gale Anne Hurd, 1985
(divorced 1989); 3) Kathryn Bigelow, 1989 (divorced 1991); 4) Linda
Hamilton, 1997 (separated); one daughter with Hamilton: Josephine Archer,
born 1993.
Career:
Financed early screenwriting with truckdriving; first professional film
job as special effects man and art director for Roger Corman, 1980; set up
production company, Lightstorm Entertainment, 1990; co-founder and CEO of
visual effects company Digital Domain, 1993;
True Lies
first film to cost over $100 million, 1994;
Titanic
first film to cost over $200 million, 1997.
Awards:
Razzie Award (USA) for Worst Screenplay, for
Rambo: First Blood Part II
(shared with Sylvester Stallone and Kevin Jarre), 1986; ShoWest (USA)
Producer of the Year, 1995; Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for
Best Director, Directors' Guild of America Award for Outstanding
Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures for
Titanic
(shared with

James Cameron

others), Golden Globe for Best Director-Motion Picture, Golden Satellite
Awards for Best Director of Motion Picture, Best Motion Picture-Drama
(shared with John Landau), and Best Motion Picture Film Editing (shared
with Richard A. Harris and Conrad Buff), American Cinema Editors Eddie
Award for Best Edited Feature Film (shared with Buff and Harris), and
Academy Awards for Best Director, Best Film Editing (shared with Buff and
Harris), and Best Picture (shared with Landau), all for
Titanic
, 1998; Academy of Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Films
Preident's Award, 1998; Golden Eddie Filmmaker of the Year Award,
2000.
Address:
Lightstorm Entertainment, 919 Santa Monica Boulevard, Santa Monica,
California 90401–2704, USA.

Hughes, David, "Magnificent Obsession (Dispatches from the Set of
Titanic
)," in
Premiere
(New York), December 1998.

* * *

In his acceptance speech at the Golden Globe awards in 1998, James Cameron
asked whether the success of
Titanic
proved once and for all that size matters. Everything about the film was
big. At over $200 million, its budget was the biggest in movie history; an
entire new studio had to be constructed for the production, including a
huge water tank to hold a ninety-percent sized replica of the original
ship. In fact, Cameron's remark could have applied to any one of
his films since the mid-1980s.
Titanic
, which he once called his "190 million-dollar chick flick,"
was merely the biggest of a series of films that have earned the director
a reputation for taking on groundbreaking and ambitious projects.

Known in Hollywood as "Iron Jim," it has been said that
working on one of Cameron's projects is like waging a military
campaign. Cameron can now demand the highest standards from his cast and
crew, but it was as a special effects expert for Roger Corman, providing
additional direction on
Battle beyond the Stars
(1980), that Cameron made his first professional steps as a filmmaker.
His first solo work as a director,
Pirhana II
, from which he was fired before completion, did not suggest the
beginnings of a glittering career. Its clunky special effects and
ludicrous storyline about pirhana fish that learn to fly are closer to
B-movie horrors from the 1950s than the director's polished later
output. It was not until 1984, and
The Terminator
, that Cameron had his first major success.

With Arnold Schwarzenegger as the T800, a cyborg back from the future,
The Terminator
cost only $6.4 million, about the same as six minutes' footage
from
Titanic. The Terminator
became something of a surprise hit, rescuing Schwarzenegger from a career
of bodybuilding films and
Conan
sequels, and launching Cameron into the big league. It brought thoughtful
science fiction to a wide audience, addressing concerns about nuclear war
and the revolution in computing and robotics that was taking hold in the
early 1980s. Widely recognized as a science-fiction classic,
The Terminator
confirmed Cameron's abilities as a director and led to him being
hired to make the high-profile sequel to Ridley Scott's
Alien.
With Sigourney Weaver reprising her role as Ripley,
Aliens
sees her awakened from hibernation fifty-seven years after her first
ordeal and returning to the mysterious planet from which she escaped in
the earlier film. Although the plot is rather derivative, the special
effects are impressive and the action relentless. One critic, Roger Ebert,
advised viewers not to eat before going to see it, but declared it
"a superb example of filmmaking craft."
Aliens
, and later films like
The Abyss
and
Terminator 2
, all contain strong female characters, and Cameron is often noted for
creating positive roles for women, but in reality his feminist credentials
are far from certain. Writing in
Entertainment Weekly
, Ty Burr even goes as far as to suggest that the presence of strong
female characters is thanks to Cameron's collaborators, Gale Ann
Hurd and Linda Hamilton, and notes the misogynistic language in
True Lies
, which is all Cameron's own work.

Special effects and slick direction redeem the otherwise disappointing
The Abyss
, which opened in 1989 to less than enthusiastic reviews. Set on a
drilling rig on the seabed, the film is slower paced than
Aliens
and contains few sympathetic characters. It is a landmark
film, however, because of the way computerized images are integrated with
live action. Cameron has been a pioneer of computer generated effects, and
in the early 1990s co-founded the IBM-backed digital effects company,
Digital Domain, in order to develop the technology further. After the
lessons learned on
The Abyss
, Computer Generated Images (CGI) were used still more effectively in his
next film,
Terminator 2.
Like the column of water in
The Abyss
, the "liquid metal" T-1000 can change into any shape. But
Terminator 2
set new standards for the integration of digital images and live action
by applying the "morphing" technique to a live actor. Even
apart from the stunning effects,
Terminator 2
is a better film than the original, combining humor, real human drama,
and large-scale set pieces in what is probably Cameron's most
balanced work.

Cameron's third Schwarzenegger vehicle,
True Lies
, is a comedy about a spy whose wife doesn't know what he really
does for a living. Like
Terminator 2
, it is also heavy with CGI, but whereas
Terminator 2
put the special effects on display, in
True Lies
, Cameron aimed to make the action as realistic as possible, concealing
computerized shots from the audience. In one stunt, for example, a truck
was supposed to leap off the end of a broken bridge and land in the water.
When it unexpectedly made it to the other side, Cameron had it removed
digitally from the bridge and made to plunge into the sea. Impressive for
its technical accomplishments,
True Lies
is rather bloated and too long for its flimsy plot.

Because of the enormous financial success of his films, Cameron is one of
the most influential figures in filmmaking, while his production company,
Lightstorm Entertainment, allows him almost total autonomy in choosing
film projects.
Titanic
is Cameron's most ambitious project to date, and its earnings take
the gross box office income of his films to over $1 billion. But although
the film was successful at the box office and at the awards, it has been
criticized for the weakness of the romantic plot at its center, and for
its failures as a human drama. In a Cameron film, however, none of this
really matters: the director's real strengths lie in his technical
brilliance and his willingness to take risks. After
Titanic
, it is difficult to imagine filmmaking on a grander scale. Yet as Cameron
himself explains, in the era of digital movie making, "There are no
limits to what you can do. Only money."

—Chris Routledge

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